ripit is looking for a file it calls $tocfile. It expects the first
line of this file to contain the string Disc ID:. A search for that
string shows that this file is actually /tmp/cdtoc.cdrom. It's
complaining about the first line of this file. I "cat" it, and it's
just the output of cda -dev /dev/cdrom toc above. If you look there
you'll see that yes, "Disc ID" does not appear on the first line.
Let's try another CD. Perhaps my Front Line Assembly disc is unique
in not having a disc ID. The file /tmp/cdtoc.cdrom now contains

No CD ID here either. (And Blue Oyster Cult is not "General Rock,"
it's classic heavy metal, dang it!) The man page for cda offers no
help, and I play with various command-line options without success.
At this point, I give up and start searching the FreeBSD mail
archives.

Oddly enough, nobody else seems to have this problem. This seems to
work for everyone in the world, except me. A quick email to
multimedia@FreeBSD.org asking for a recommended ripping tools
actually nets me a few pointers. Back to ripit!

So, something has changed. The output from cda doesn't match what
ripit is expecting. Either ripit has changed, or cda has. Let's
track that down.

My first suspect is cda. It's obviously a dependency port of ripit,
but which port? We can find out with the -W flag to pkg_info(1).

cda is part of xmcd. Let's check out the FreeBSD CVS repository
and see if the port has changed lately. There's a friendly Web
interface available that
lists all changes ever made to the FreeBSD source repository. Select
"ports," "audio," and "xmcd." There you can see all changes made to
any file in the port.

Aha! Four weeks ago, the FreeBSD Security Officer updated this port
to a new major version. No wonder it works slightly differently. The
commit message says that the old version had various security issues,
none of which are of any importance whatsoever on my laptop. (They
would be exploitable on a system used by multiple users, however.)

I'm running 4.4-RC3. 4.3-RELEASE had the older version. I downloaded
this package from a FreeBSD FTP site, deinstalled the existing xmcd
package, and installed the one from 4.3-R. And at last I got:

Note the difference between the first lines of the output in this
older version of cda, and the output of the newer version of cda. The
ripit utility ran fine. I now have two dozen CDs on my laptop, and even my
Nurse With Wound albums don't sound too bad in MP3.

The lesson here is that you need to solve problems on your own. ripit
worked fine for everyone who had a version of xmcd more than a month
old. I'm sure other people have had this problem and have either given up
or decided not to worry about it. It's also something of a flaw in
the Unix philosophy of "many small, independent tools"; changes in one
tool can affect others in unsuspected ways.

Now if I could just get my circa-1982 Throbbing Gristle cassettes onto
MP3, I'd be all set.

(The author would like to thank the various folks on
freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org who assured him that he wasn't crazy,
and this really was supposed to work.)